Shortly after watching Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018) one of my homies angrily texted me: “Why did Tom (Trevante Rhodes) have to die? And why did Malorie (Sandra Bullock) get to live?” While I knew exactly why he was so mad, I didn’t share his sense of surprise. Early on, after recognizing that the film […]
While poetry and the horror genre may seem like opposites, they do share some similarities, namely their use of image and metaphor to address deeper issues. Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror contains a wide range of poetic responses to horror. There are haikus about Poltergeist, multiple responses to the Frankenstein story, elegies […]
Thanks to the Howell Carnegie District Library in Howell, Michigan, who invited me to give the talk from which this article grew. One afternoon on a late summer weekend in 1983, I was flipping through the channels looking for something to watch on TV. I’m not even sure cable was something ordinary folks could have […]
As a fan of Christmas horror films, I’m very happy to be able to recommend Await Further Instructions (2018), written by Gavin Williams and directed by Johnny Kevorkian, director and writer of the horror feature, The Disappeared (2008). Await Further Instructions has a lot going for it, including what is essential to Christmas horror—the agonizingly […]
Salem’s Lot is about vampires, of course. But as I recently re-read King’s 1975 novel and watched the exceptional TV miniseries (directed by Tobe Hooper) from 1979, it occurred to me that the latter—the film, not the novel–might also be about the nuclear threat. In 1979, America was entrenched in Cold War paranoia, with the […]
At the start of David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 film It Follows, protagonist Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex with a young man who calls himself Hugh (Jake Weary). He then chloroforms her, ties her to a wheelchair, and explains that a creature—referred to as “It”—is going to follow her until she has sex with someone else. […]
The slasher subgenre has long held a complex relationship with women in horror—both onscreen and in the audience. Criticized for its misogynistic representation of women as passive victims, it has been simultaneously praised for its progressive portrayal of active, strong female heroines. In the 1960s, the emergence of the women’s movement in America was a symptom […]
In the annals of horror comedy, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein occupies a unique space for both its plot-driven narrative and its subtle inclusivity. Combining satire, parody and slapstick, the film is effective primarily due to its reinterpretation of genre tropes and its commitment to illustrating how inequitable cultural systems are predicated upon illogical thinking so […]
We are very pleased to bring you this exclusive chapter preview from the forthcoming House of Leaves publication, Scared Sacred: Idolatry, Religion and Worship in the Horror Film (out next year). In this chapter, Samm Deighan explores the directorial work of William Peter Blatty (author of the 1971 novel The Exorcist) in The Ninth Configuration (1980) and […]